Walt Disney Quotes in Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

Walt Disney: George Banks and all he stands for will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

[last lines]

[Travers is at the premiere and she is crying]

Walt Disney: It's all right, Mrs. Travers. It's alright. Mr. Banks is going to be all right. I promise.

P.L. Travers: No, no. It's just that - I can't, I can't abide cartoons!

[Travers and Disney are at Disneyland, and Travers is on a carousel horse]

Walt Disney: The boys have had an idea for your Mr. Banks. I think it'll make you happy.

P.L. Travers: You brought me all the way out here to tell me that?

Walt Disney: No. I brought you all the way out here for monetary gain. Had a wager with the boys that I couldn't get you on a ride. I just won twenty bucks!

Walt Disney: It's not the children she comes to save. It's their father. It's YOUR father, Travers Goff.

Walt Disney: Look at you! I could eat you up!

P.L. Travers: That wouldn't be appropriate.

Walt Disney: I've fought this battle from her side. Pat Powers, he wanted the mouse and I didn't have a bean back then. He was this big terrifying New York producer and I was just a kid from Missouri with a sketch of Mickey, but it would've killed me to give him up. Honest to God, killed me. That mouse, he's family.

Walt Disney: You know, you've never been to Disneyland, that's the happiest place on earth.

P.L. Travers: I cannot tell you how uninterested - no, positively sickened I am at the thought of going to see your dollar-printing machine.

Walt Disney: Well come on! When does anybody get to go to Disneyland with Walt Disney himself?

P.L. Travers: Disappointments are to the soul what the thunderstorm is to the sky.

[Disney hangs up angrily]

P.L. Travers: [offended] Hello? Hello? He hung up!

Walt Disney: Please sit down.

P.L. Travers: I shall not sit in the seat of a trickster! A fraudster! A sneak!

Walt Disney: Mrs. Travers, what in the world has upset you so?

P.L. Travers: Penguins have very much upset me! Animated, dancing penguins! Now, you have seduced me with the music, Mr Disney, yes, you have. Those Sherman boys have quite turned my head but I shall NOT be moved on the matter of *cartoons!*

Walt Disney: There's no greater joy than that seen through the eyes of a child, and there's a little bit of a child in all of us.

P.L. Travers: Maybe in you, Mr. Disney, but certainly not in me.

Walt Disney: Get on the horse, Pamela.

Walt Disney: "No whimsy or sentiment!" says the woman who sends a flying nanny with a talking umbrella to save the children.

P.L. Travers: You think Mary Poppins is saving the children, Mr. Disney?

[Walt and the other filmmakers are stunned silent]

P.L. Travers: Oh, dear!

[Walks away]

Walt Disney, Richard Sherman: [singing] My world was calm, well ordered, exemplary / Then came this person, with chaos in her wake /And now my life's ambitions go with one fell blow / It's quite a bitter pill to take.

Walt Disney: Inspired by someone we know?

Richard Sherman: [feigning innocence] You'd have to ask Bob.

Walt Disney: We can't make the picture without the color red. The film is set in London, for Pete's sake!

P.L. Travers: And?

Walt Disney: Well, there's buses and mailboxes and guard's uniforms and things - Heck, the English flag!

P.L. Travers: I understand your predicament, Mr. Disney. I do. It's just - I don't know what it is, I'm suddenly very anti-red. I shan't be wearing it ever again.

Walt Disney: Is this a test, Pamela? Are you requiring proof as to how much I want to make you happy so we can create this beautiful thing together?

P.L. Travers: I took you at your word, Mr. Disney, and it seems my first stipulation has been denied. There will be many more. So perhaps we should just call it quits and I...

[She takes out the rights]

P.L. Travers: should hand you back these.

[pause. Disney faces his crew]

Walt Disney: All right. No red in the picture.

Walt Disney: Have you ever been to Kansas City, Mrs. Travers? Do you know Missouri at all?

P.L. Travers: I can't say I do.

Walt Disney: Well, it's mighty cold there in the winters. Bitter cold. And my dad, Elias Disney, he owned a newspaper delivery route there. A thousand papers, twice daily; a morning and an evening edition. And dad was a tough businessman. He was a "save a penny any way you can" type of fella, so he wouldn't employ delivery boys. No, no, no... he used me and my big brother Roy. I was eight back then, just eight years old. And, like I said, winters are harsh, and Old Elias, he didn't believe in new shoes until the old ones were worn through. And honestly, Mrs. Travers, the snowdrifts, sometimes they were up over my head and we'd push through that snow like it was molasses. The cold and wet seeping through our clothes and our shoes. Skin peeling from our faces. Sometimes I'd find myself sunk down in the snow, just waking up because I must have passed out or something, I don't know. And then it was time for school and I was too cold and wet to figure out equations and things. And then it was back out in the know again to get home just before dark. Mother would feed us dinner and then it was time to go right back out and do it again for the evening edition. "You'd best be quick there, Walt. You'd better get those newspapers up on that porch and under that storm door. Poppa's gonna lose his temper again and show you the buckle end of his belt, boy."

[Travers looks noticeably unsettled by his story]

Walt Disney: I don't tell you this to make you sad, Mrs. Travers. I don't. I love my life, I think it's a miracle. And I loved my dad. He was a wonderful man. But rare is the day when I don't think about that eight-year-old boy delivering newspapers in the snow and old Elias Disney with that strap in his fist. And I am just so tired, Mrs. Travers. I'm tired of remembering it *that* way. Aren't you tired, too, Mrs. Travers? Now we all have our sad tales, buy don't you want to finish the story? Let is all go and have a life that isn't dictated by the past? It's not the children she comes to save. It's their father. It's *your* father... Travers Goff.

P.L. Travers: I don't know what you think you know about me, Walter...

Walt Disney: You must have loved and admired him a lot to take his name. It's him this is all about, isn't it? All of it, everything. Forgiveness, Mrs. Travers, it's what I learned from your books.

P.L. Travers: I don't have to forgive my father. He was a wonderful man.

Walt Disney: No... you need to forgive Helen Goff. Life is a harsh sentence to lay down for yourself.

Walt Disney: [preparing tea] And a spoonful of sugar?

P.L. Travers: No, I think I'll have whiskey.

Walt Disney: You look at me and you see some kind of Hollywood King Midas. You think I've built and empire and I want your Mary Poppins as just another brick in my kingdom.

P.L. Travers: And don't you?

Walt Disney: Now, if that's all it was, would I have suckered up to a stubborn, cranky dame like you for twenty years? No, I'd have saved myself an ulcer.

Walt Disney: I have my own Mr. Banks. Mine had a mustache.

P.L. Travers: [sarcastically] So it's not true that Disney created man in his own image?

Walt Disney: No, but it is true that you created yourself in someone else, yes?

Walt Disney: Well, Pamela Travers! Oh, my dear gal, you can't tell how excited I am to finally meet you...

P.L. Travers: It's an honour, Mr. Disney.

Walt Disney: Oh, Walt, now, you gotta call me Walt.

Walt Disney: Don't you want to finish the story?

Walt Disney: I think life disappoints you, Ms. Travers. I think it's done that a lot. And maybe Mary Poppins is the only person in your life who hasn't.

P.L. Travers: Mary Poppins isn't real.

Walt Disney: That's not true. She was as real as can be to my daughters, and to thousands of other children - adults too. She's been a nighttime comfort to a heck of a lot of people.

P.L. Travers: Then where is she when I need her? I open the door for Mary Poppins, and who should be standing there but Walt Disney!

Walt Disney: Pam, a man cannot break a promise he's made to his kids, no matter how long it takes for him to make it come true. Now, you kept me dangling all this time. But now, I gotcha.

P.L. Travers: Gotcha, indeed! Mr. Disney, if you have "dangled", it is at the end of a rope you have fashioned for yourself. I was perfectly clear when you approached me 20 years ago that she wasn't for sale and I was clear again when you approached me the following year and clear again when you approached me every annum for the subsequent 18 years and quite honestly, I feel corralled!

[Dolly is relaying Mrs. Travers' notes to Disney]

Dolly: She wants to know why Mr. Banks was given a moustache.

Walt Disney: [off-handedly] Oh, I asked for that.

Dolly: Yes, she wants to know why.

Walt Disney: [pointedly] Because *I* asked for it.

Walt Disney: Mr. Newman, I've been trying to get a hold of you.